This is the kind of street many facilities-dependent cyclists would want a bike lane on (resulting in the kind of installations seen below). It's also just the kind of street you really can't put one on. Four eleven foot wide lanes, and traffic volumes and on-street parking prevent a road diet to two lanes with a center turn lane. It's not too dis-similar from streets in Dallas in and near the Central Business District.
But what about using sharrows as a substitute for bike lanes? Well, the road usage and the soon to be released MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices) guide poses a problem. The new (but not yet released) MUTCD includes sharrows, but it says to place them 4' from the curb face unless on-street parking is allowed, to indicate the cyclist's lateral lane position. The recommendation with allowed on-street parking is 11' from curb face.
So, on this street, where on-street parking is allowed during off-peak hours, where would you place them? 4' from curb face? Oops! Parked cars (off peak)! Forget the 11' (that's the lane stripe), so how about 4' from the lane's right edge? Oops! No cars parked in the outside lane (peak hours), so cars are passing cyclists on the right!
So when people say "just install sharrows", where do you put them?
One solution is to only use them on streets that never allow parking. But those tend to be roads with higher speed limits in lower population density areas... places where sharrows won't have much of a warrant.
3 comments:
You would not believe how deluxe your road system is in Dallas compared to Orlando. Your traffic volumes on bike route roads are lower and the roads are much wider.
Most of our low-speed connector roads here are narrow 2-lane and non-expandable. Very few of our residential streets connect in any useful way and those that do are often brick (really awful brick). Because of our lack of connectivity, those roads also attract cut-thru traffic trying to escape the arterials.
Winter Park has applied sharrows to one such road (the only bike route they didn't ruin with bricks) and I support it. The lanes are very narrow and there are times when motorists can't pass due to oncoming traffic and poor sightlines. The sharrows are centered in the lane. They may add a little encouragement for cyclists to take their rightful place. Or not. But they do no harm. I'd prefer BMUFL signs, but Winter Park doesn't want to sully its neighborhoods with signs.
My intent was to use sharrows to supplement/replace bike route signs, and use them at approaches and exits to intersections (with others every 1/4 mile or so for long stretches). Middle of the lane, and perhaps larger.
The MUTCD's proposed recommendation for use puzzles me.
Think Sausage.
The MUTCD recommendation for use was mangled by compromise to get the device into the manual. DOTs (car-centric traditionalists) HATE the idea of letting cyclists "get in the way."
It's a damn shame we don't have the strength of bike advocacy organizations to fight the anti-cycling biases that want to force us into the gutter.
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